Google’s money making levers pulled again

December 22, 2008
by Andy Heaps

We do, every now and then see more subtle changes – smaller levers being pulled. One that we noticed last week was a change to the way product search results were displayed in the SERPs. To illustrate, lets play a little game of spot the difference (made very easy by the big red box):

Before:

After:

The slight change in the latter is that you now have to click through to Google’s Product Search results to be able to then click through to the products listed. A subtle change, but one that enables Google to force a further set of Adwords ads onto searchers - this time on the product search results page.

I can’t see how this could have anything but a negative impact on the user experience –one extra click can lose the attention of a significant number of potential customers. But hey, what better time to trial it than during the peak of online retail?